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Utilitywise is one of the UK's leading and most innovative business energy and water consultancies.
We're here to help you build a better business by being smarter with your energy and water use. Our partnership with Dell enables us to deliver Internet of Things (IoT) Intelligent Building Controls solutions, helping clients better control their energy use.

We work with over 40,000 clients across the UK & Europe which makes us the UK's largest Energy Consultancy.

3 reasons not to delay ESOS Phase 2 compliance

The department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) recently published their ‘Interim process and early impact evaluation report’ regarding Phase 1 of the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS).

In the report, BEIS concluded that,

“The ESOS compliance process was, however, characterised by a large degree of procrastination by obligated organisations with many delaying their decision to explore or pursue compliance options until close to the compliance deadline … (this) is likely to have resulted in many organisations paying higher prices for the required energy audit services than may have been the case if demand had been smoothed over 2015”.

So, here’s 3 reasons not to delay Phase 2 compliance any further:

Reason 1 – avoid paying over the odds

Many organisations delayed the start of their compliance journey until close to the deadline. This lead to a squeeze in service provision, leading many suppliers to increase the cost of their services. Environment Agency (EA) notification data shows a significant spike in compliance notifications around one month prior to the 5 December 2015 deadline. What’s more, 33% of all who complied by July 2016, did so in the final week of Phase 1. A further 30% of notifications were logged by the end of January 2016.

Had demand for ESOS compliance support been smoothed over the course of 2015, costs may have been more reasonable as the deadline approached. The lesson here is not to wait until the final months of 2019 to get started with Phase 2.

Reason 2 – ESOS Lead Assessor numbers are limited

There were almost 950 ESOS Lead Assessors accredited across 14 approved registers by the Phase 1 deadline. BEIS suggests there were enough Lead Assessors to help organisations reach compliance. By 5 December 2015 there were 7.3 qualifying undertakings per Lead Assessor. This is based on an estimated 6,933 organisations that met the ESOS qualification criteria.

However, this doesn’t take into account the Lead Assessors that become accredited purely to certify their own organisations alone. So, in fact, the 900+ Lead Assessors would’ve been spread far more thinly. There’s also a broad scope of the size of organisations (by employee size) and number of sites per qualifying business, meaning not every organisation would have been as easy, or as quick, to assess as another.

Our advice would be to get advice from compliance partners you already know who have a proven track record with Phase 1 compliance.

Delaying compliance for as long as possible means by the time you comply you’ll simply be ticking a box and more than likely paying an unreasonably high cost.

Acting now allows your organisation to really invest in the compliance process by ensuring you have strong and accurate reporting of your energy consumption data. Accurate data is the start of being able to visualise and truly understand when, where, and how you use energy and, more importantly, how you can improve your efficiency to increase savings.

There are plenty of energy savings to make

Remove the burden of compliance and have more time to focus on seizing energy saving opportunities. On average we found savings of three times the cost of compliance for our Phase 1 clients, with an average of 18% kWh savings per organisation.

In total, we identified 2.3 million tonnes worth of CO2 savings – the equivalent of 1,138 Wembley Stadiums full of carbon! We found the most common areas for energy savings recommendations were energy management and lighting.

Start your ESOS compliance journey with Utilitywise today

In their latest newsletter, the EA advised participants that expect to qualify for Phase 2 to start their Energy Audit Program as early as possible. The EA are also continuing to issue enforcement notices for Phase 1 – if you’ve received an enforcement notice we can help you with ESOS compliance.